Mayor Zohran Mamdani is ordering the NYPD to release all body-worn camera footage within 30 days of major incidents, formalizing a practice that was not consistently met before Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch took over the department.
The policy, announced on Tuesday, requires footage to be released within 30 calendar days of an officer shooting or seriously injuring a member of the public. It codifies a practice Tisch has largely followed since becoming commissioner in November 2024.
"Transparency and accountability are the building blocks of public safety," Mamdani said in a statement. "By codifying the timely release of body-worn camera footage, we are ensuring that New Yorkers receive timely information about critical incidents."
Tisch called body cameras "clear and objective accounts" of police interactions and said the policy is "a continuation of my pledge to ensure transparency regarding the work of the department."
Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association union, said the policy "does not change the reality for police officers, because the NYPD has routinely released footage within that timeframe for the past several years."
"What is far more important is the way that elected leaders respond when a police officer is involved in a dangerous and chaotic situation," he said. "It is critical that there is no rush to judgment before all the facts are in."
Still, Stephen Davis, a former NYPD captain who ran the department's public information office for four years, said the 30-day window presents practical challenges.
"There's a lot of different moving parts here that you've got to consider," he said. "It's not just releasing a statistic. It's releasing specific information about a particular event that has a lot of different aspects to it. And you got to make sure that you address each one of those."
Davis said officials must weigh police unions' concerns, the exposure of potential witnesses and interference with ongoing criminal and civil cases.
Before Tisch, city police commissioners often took months — and in some cases more than a year — to release footage.
In 2020, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio had previously announced a similar 30-day deadline after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer that year. But commissioners frequently exceeded that timeframe under his successor Eric Adams, with no formal enforcement mechanisms in place.
It was not immediately clear how Mamdani plans to enforce the 30-day requirement.
Under Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, the NYPD took an average of 276 days to release such footage. That average dropped to 91 days under her successor, Edward Caban, and then to 25 days under Tisch, according to a Gothamist analysis of NYPD release data.
Some advocates said formalizing the timeline does not address deeper concerns about how the footage is presented to the public.
The NYPD typically precedes each body camera video with a narrative of the event, which some critics have characterized as one-sided.
"BWC footage that arrives in 30 days instead of 275 doesn't address the real issue if it's still being packaged and presented to serve the department's interests rather than the public's right to transparency and accountability," said Yul-san Liem, deputy director of the Justice Committee, a grassroots group fighting police violence and systemic racism in the city. "Until we see real discipline for misconduct caught on camera, this policy is just damage control."
